TV #4 of 2021:
Justified, season 1
I’m not thrilled with the first hour of this show about a trigger-happy US Marshal, which has a whole lot of white supremacist violence and rhetoric used as an apparent shorthand for villainy, I assume so that audiences can know which group of white gentiles are the good guys and which group of white gentiles are the bad guys. (I’m sorry, but even for a decade ago, it’s in supremely poor taste to have characters stand in front of swastika flags and discuss their hatred of blacks and Jews when the series cast has one African American character with barely any screentime and no Jewish people whatsoever. We’re not just ideological props to justify the use of deadly force.) There’s no real effort to grapple with the dynamic that draws many actual law enforcement officers to join Neo-Nazi type movements, either; viewers are supposed to simply accept that Raylan and his colleagues abhor Boyd’s message like anyone should.
So that sets me off on the wrong foot, and I’m honestly not sure how much more of it I could have taken. But programs often adjust their formula following the pilot, and in this instance, that thankfully means that the bigotry is scaled way way down (although there remain plenty of slurs, mainly racist and homophobic). When that initial antagonist reappears, he’s still a dangerous backwoods killer, but he’s no longer blowing up black churches or complaining that Jews control the banks. The writers also do a nice job of balancing the loosely serialized elements like his rising threat vs possible reform with a fun case-of-the-week structure — which appears mostly to exist in order to give a talented pool of guest stars the chance to try on their best Kentucky accents and roll around in the delightfully colorful dialogue.
Episode by episode, this is a drama that I’m finding entertaining and engaging, full of complex simmering family conflicts, and after Deadwood and Santa Clarita Diet, I’d pretty much watch Timothy Olyphant in anything. It has some early growing pains, but we seem to have gotten past them well before the end of this debut year, and I’m excited to see where the broader story heads next.
★★★★☆
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